Capítulo 4
How Subcultures Shape Workplace Wellbeing
While organizational culture sets the overall tone, subcultures-formed around work teams, locations, or common interests-often have more direct influence on health behaviors. These subcultures can either support or undermine wellbeing efforts, making them critical to address when building a healthy workplace.
Consider how workplace subcultures impact various dimensions of health:
• They influence what, when, and how much employees eat-from break room food choices to eating patterns
• Team norms determine whether employees take proper lunch breaks or eat at their desks
• Work subcultures affect home behaviors, like whether employees feel compelled to check emails after hours
• The difference between teams that normalize overwork versus those that prioritize breaks directly impacts sleep quality
Remote workers face specific challenges with work-life boundaries, as the physical separation between work and home disappears. Many feel pressure to prove their productivity by working longer hours, sacrificing family time, exercise, and proper meals. The physical workspace setup also impacts wellbeing-whether a desk is placed in a bedroom (blurring rest boundaries) or in a basement with limited natural light.
Leaders can foster healthy subcultures without significant financial investment. Simple gestures like providing desk plants bring nature into the workspace. Supporting healthy subcultures might just mean allowing groups to use existing facilities for activities like softball games or repurposing spaces for group gatherings. Small grants can target specific subculture needs, like helping nightshift workers develop coping skills for sleeping during daytime hours.
Company-wide wellbeing initiatives become more effective when smaller teams can participate together. When teams experience programs like mindfulness training as a unit, it normalizes practices that might otherwise seem unusual, demonstrates leadership support, encourages peer accountability, and creates shared experiences teams can reference when facing challenges. As Safeer puts it, "The team that 'ohms' together, stays together."
Leaders must also recognize that unhealthy subcultures like smoking groups can undermine organizational wellbeing goals. These can be addressed by removing enablers (relocating secluded benches where smokers gather), implementing policies (smoke-free workdays), creating financial incentives (health premium differentials for non-smokers), and setting clear expectations during hiring.
Capítulo 5
Creating a Positive Social Climate That Fosters Wellbeing
A positive social climate-where employees experience an upbeat attitude, trust each other, and feel aligned toward common goals-makes establishing and maintaining relationships easier. In such environments, work becomes a source of fulfillment rather than just a paycheck.
Building community at work fulfills a fundamental human need. Organizations can foster community through thoughtful onboarding that emphasizes collegiality, creating social spaces where employees can interact, and building trust through vulnerability. When leaders share their personal struggles, as former Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini did about his near-fatal accident and recovery, it creates psychological safety for employees to be authentic.
A positive attitude in the workplace can't be blamed on external factors-it comes from within. When hope and optimism flourish in an organization, employee performance improves alongside job satisfaction, happiness, and organizational commitment. This positive outlook translates to better health outcomes, resilience, and retention. Employees with upbeat attitudes are better equipped to collaborate, find creative solutions to challenges, and weather difficult periods.
Organizations should implement strategies that support good social climate:
1. **Include attitude in recruitment** by seeking candidates who emit positive energy, optimism, and warmth.
2. **Prioritize self-care** to be at your best for those around you. Sleeping well, eating nutritiously, getting outdoors, and exercising help us feel good inside and emit positive emotions to others.
3. **Balance feedback** with research showing high-functioning teams share three times more positive experiences than negative ones. Harvard studies suggest employees ideally need six pieces of positive feedback for every critical improvement.
4. **Practice gratitude and recognition**. While 90% of American CEOs agree gratitude is important, only one-third of employees are satisfied with the amount they receive.
5. **Celebrate successes** along the way to milestones. This applies to good customer service, increased sales, and employees reaching wellbeing goals.
6. **Use holidays** as opportunities for injecting positivity into the workplace. Even without lavish budgets, companies can create fun experiences.
7. **Smile more**. A simple smile can effectively promote health and happiness by lowering blood pressure, reducing stress, and improving attitude.
Home life fundamentally affects workplace performance-employees struggling with family challenges can't fully engage at work. Smart organizations support employees' home lives through expanded employee assistance programs and family-inclusive benefits. Companies like Amazon (with dog parks and treats) and flexible work arrangements like Salesforce's semi-remote model demonstrate how respecting life outside work contributes to organizational culture and employee wellbeing.
Capítulo 6
Establishing Healthy Norms That Stick
Norms-the shared behaviors and attitudes that define "how we do things around here"-powerfully shape individual behavior within organizations. While changing some behaviors is relatively easy, adopting healthy behaviors that go against established norms in our social circles is much more difficult.
Unhealthy workplace norms-like working well beyond 9-to-5 hours, sending emails at all hours, and bringing sugary treats to meetings-make maintaining healthy habits feel like swimming upstream. Leaders must identify these norms to change them by asking key questions: What unhealthy behaviors persist despite efforts to eliminate them? What departments show stronger health focus or team atmosphere? What healthy norms have you successfully established?
While norms provide structure and consistency, they can adapt to changing conditions-as demonstrated by the rapid adoption of COVID-19 safety measures in many communities. When selecting norms to transform, three fundamentals matter:
1. Choose norms that align with organizational values-a company valuing work-life balance might establish a "no after-hours emails" norm.
2. Ensure norms are meaningful to employees, as humans need cognitive closure and will reject behaviors with low personal payoff.
3. Norms must be meaningful to the organization itself, addressing pressing needs like safety in manufacturing or employee retention in retail.
Workplace norms are more effective when extended into employees' other cultural spheres. Our habits are often influenced more by those we live with than work with-food choices, for instance, are largely determined by whoever shops or cooks at home. Organizations might invite spouses to join health programs or open employee cafeterias to family members.
Cultural norms exist on a spectrum with dangerous extremes: authoritarian control and anomie (normlessness). Authoritarian approaches restrict freedoms essential to wellbeing and violate our need for autonomy. Conversely, anomie often emerges during transitions like company acquisitions, when accepted norms disappear, potentially leading to unethical behavior or talent exodus.
Changing norms requires getting groups to adopt new behaviors, attitudes, or beliefs while maintaining psychological safety. This gradual process demands planning, execution, and maintenance, potentially taking months or years depending on organization size and norm complexity. Success requires addressing team social climate first, ensuring cohesion and a shared wellbeing vision, connecting to organizational values, securing leadership support, and creating multiple "culture connection points" to shape norms effectively.
Capítulo 7
Strategic Culture Connection Points That Make Healthy Choices Easier
Our workplaces make countless decisions daily that impact employee wellbeing, creating subtle and overt cues that shape behaviors and attitudes. By strategically adjusting these "culture connection points," organizations can make healthy choices easier and build a wellbeing culture that helps employees maintain healthy practices.
**Recruitment and Selection**: Organizations with strong wellbeing cultures naturally attract health-oriented candidates. Companies like Dell Technologies emphasize work-life balance in job postings, while Southwest Airlines prominently features wellbeing on their careers page. Smart hiring practices include designing interview questions about how candidates will contribute to team wellbeing and ensuring job descriptions reflect wellbeing values.
**First Impressions**: Wellbeing culture begins with onboarding, as early experiences make lasting impressions. Effective onboarding should include explaining the wellness vision, team wellbeing norms, and the importance of self-care, backed by consistent actions like healthy meals and activity breaks. For remote workers, companies implement special practices like virtual coffee moments, regular check-ins, and online games to establish social connections despite physical distance.
**Information and Communication**: While health education alone has limited impact on behavior, creative communication methods can make a difference. Effective health communication avoids medical jargon, uses health literacy practices, leverages credible messengers like physicians or respected healthy employees, incorporates appropriate humor rather than shame or fear, utilizes trusted co-workers as champions, and includes family members who influence employees' health decisions.
**Benefits and Programs**: Benefits extend far beyond basic retirement plans and health insurance, offering countless opportunities to support workforce wellbeing. Effective benefits remove barriers to healthy behaviors, like providing free blood pressure monitors for home use or installing self-serve stations at work. Modern companies offer extensive benefits from childcare to eldercare, legal assistance, and even on-campus services like haircuts (Google, Genentech), laundry, and bike repair.
**Stories and Narratives**: Stories captivate attention and remain memorable long after facts and figures fade. Leadership stories are particularly powerful, like when Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini shared his personal journey through pain management and suicidal thoughts following a skiing accident. The most effective stories are relatable, allowing listeners to imagine themselves in similar situations. Companies like Unilever address mental health proactively through storytelling films, including their chief learning officer's experience with PTSD.
**Learning and Training**: While we require licenses to drive vehicles for safety reasons, we often overlook training employees for workplace wellbeing despite workplace conditions contributing to three times more deaths than car accidents. Companies like Hilton invest in training beyond physical health, teaching resiliency, focus, and optimism through their "Thrive@Hilton" program. At Johns Hopkins Medicine, managers receive Ten-Minute Well-Being Tips weekly, learning to lead with a wellbeing lens.
**Symbols and Traditions**: Symbolic acts represent organizational beliefs and priorities. A fitness center symbolizes commitment to health, while releasing time for wellbeing activities demonstrates its importance. UC Davis leaders moved their parking spots farther from entrances to encourage walking, visibly demonstrating their commitment. Rituals also shape culture-from Wegmans' stretch breaks announced overhead to annual 5K runs or reimagined birthday celebrations focused on fun rather than sugar.
**Physical Environment**: The workplace significantly impacts wellbeing culture. Even modest environmental changes can promote movement-affordable standing desks, well-designed stairwells, or simply keeping stairwells clean with directional signage can encourage physical activity. For stress management, creating accessible brain-break spaces like USAA's "Energize Zones" or mounting coloring sheets for mindful coloring can help employees reset.
Capítulo 8
The Power of Peer Support in Sustaining Healthy Behaviors
Peer support is perhaps the greatest predictor of success in adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyle habits. Our friends, family, and colleagues significantly influence our health behaviors-from exercise habits to weight management and even happiness levels. Research shows that having an obese friend increases our own obesity risk by over 50%, and similar patterns exist with alcohol consumption.
Willpower alone is a flawed strategy for making healthy choices. The author shares a personal example of struggling to resist chocolate at work, where the office layout and colleague behaviors created constant temptation. Despite determination, visual cues triggered cravings that were difficult to resist. The author eventually found success by using an alternative entrance to avoid seeing the snack area, demonstrating how environmental design and peer influence can undermine personal willpower.
Having a buddy makes it easier to be happy and healthy. During COVID-19, Massachusetts General Hospital created a buddy program to combat loneliness and disconnection. The CDC recognizes buddy systems as effective for staff members to share responsibility for each other's wellbeing. Microsoft found that onboarding buddies boost productivity and satisfaction among new employees.
Professional subcultures significantly influence health behaviors. While nurses or food service workers are naturally active throughout their workday, office workers like accountants, lawyers, and executives face challenges in maintaining physical activity. Peers can help regardless of team, profession, or location-they're the people we connect with outside organizational structures. The more frequently we interact with peers, the more they can support our efforts to change behaviors, beliefs, or attitudes, making it easier to incorporate healthy habits like walking breaks.
Organizations can amplify peer support through wellness champions-employees passionate about health who make meaningful contributions while improving their own well-being through purpose. These champions facilitate changes tailored to their workgroups and subcultures, providing critical "boots on the ground" that complement top-down leadership. When trusted peers promote health initiatives, it normalizes workplace health discussions.
Structured lifestyle medicine programs create built-in peer support networks by gathering employees with similar health objectives for weekly meetings over several months, focusing on skills, problem-solving, and habit formation. As participants share struggles and vulnerabilities, trust develops and collective experience drives powerful results.
Most people lack training in how to effectively support others' well-being goals. Essential peer support skills include active listening, goal-setting assistance, identifying role models, removing barriers, building trust, locating supportive environments, working through setbacks, and celebrating successes.
Social connectedness creates feelings of belonging and community that are fundamental to human well-being. Without it, loneliness and depression can develop. Social support networks improve quality of life, lower blood pressure, and reduce chronic disease risk. For employers, fostering workplace social connections builds resilience and crisis management capabilities.
Capítulo 9
Leadership's Crucial Role in Wellbeing Culture
Leaders at all levels face personal well-being challenges while simultaneously influencing their teams' health. When leaders like Ellen Derrick and Mark Bertolini share their own struggles, they create psychological safety that allows others to seek help. Without engaging leaders at every level, well-being initiatives will fail to penetrate the organization's fabric.
Effective leaders like former Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson demonstrate that prioritizing employee well-being enables all other business goals. When Johnson told employees "No partner should be asked to choose between work and their health" during the pandemic and continued paying retail staff for 30 days during closures, he established well-being as the company's top priority.
Leaders can demonstrate this priority by putting well-being on meeting agendas, making it a business goal with accountability, and providing managers with proper training to address team well-being needs. Company-wide wellbeing initiatives become more effective when smaller teams can participate together. When teams experience programs like mindfulness training as a unit, it normalizes practices that might otherwise seem unusual.
Our behaviors as leaders influence those we lead more than our words. Simple actions like taking the stairs instead of the elevator demonstrate commitment to well-being. Don't hide your well-being practices-share your mindfulness techniques when stress comes up in conversation, participate visibly in organizational programs, and make it easier for well-being practices to surface on your team through walking meetings or breathing exercises.
Most leaders are promoted for previous success rather than leadership skills, and few receive training on supporting team well-being. Yet the way managers treat employees significantly impacts how they feel about themselves and their work. Leaders' words leave lasting impressions. Provide regular positive feedback without always following it with criticism. Simple questions like "How are you doing today?" demonstrate caring and build trust.
Your management approach directly affects team health and effectiveness. Give team members latitude in decision-making while setting clear guidelines and expectations. Regularly assess workloads to ensure they're challenging but not overwhelming, and distribute work fairly. Give credit where it's due-acknowledge good work publicly and let team members present their projects rather than taking credit yourself.
As a leader, you have the privilege of creating a well-being culture that contributes to your team's happiness, health, and resilience. Changing culture requires attention and intention, as old habits die hard. You must promote, advocate for, and defend employee health initiatives with the same vigor as other business necessities.
Capítulo 10
Measuring and Sustaining a Wellbeing Culture
Measuring culture doesn't require complicated blood tests or expensive metrics-sometimes simply asking employees for their opinions provides the most meaningful data. Self-reported health assessments are powerful predictors; those reporting poor health have 1.5-3 times higher mortality rates than those reporting excellent health. Employee opinions serve as a barometer for whether your strategy is impacting behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes.
For team-level assessment, anonymous five-point scale questionnaires can help assess three key areas: social climate (team attitude, trust, connection), health-supporting norms (agreed-upon healthy habits, work-life balance), and manager effectiveness in creating well-being culture. For organization-wide assessment, a simple six-question survey can evaluate all well-being culture building blocks: leadership, norms, social climate, shared values, culture connection points, and peer support.
While quantitative surveys provide quick insights, qualitative feedback through written responses offers more nuanced understanding of employee perceptions. Just as sports scores don't tell a complete game story, survey numbers don't capture the full employee experience. Anonymous, open-ended questions about each culture-building framework component can yield richer insights than numerical ratings alone.
Next Jump, an e-commerce company handling loyalty programs for major corporations, views wellbeing not as a cost but as an investment. By offering better breaks, physical activities, psychological coaching, and healthy snacks, they saw annual sales growth increase from 30% to 120%-proving that caring for employees benefits business. Unfortunately, many employers see wellbeing initiatives only as expenses. Smart investments in prevention can yield significant returns: a $50 blood pressure monitor is vastly cheaper than the $20,000+ cost of treating strokes or heart attacks.
Building a wellbeing culture isn't linear-it typically starts slowly but accelerates as positive changes become visible. Five variables influence how quickly your initiatives take root: the perceived benefit to individuals and the organization; alignment with company values and history; simplicity of the proposed transformation; ability to test on a small scale first; and building confidence through successful pilots before organization-wide deployment.
Creating a wellbeing culture resembles preparing a Thanksgiving feast-requiring extensive planning, coordination, and effort that most will never fully appreciate. Just as holiday meals create lasting family traditions, our workplace cultures blend individual contributions from team members, each bringing their own "dish" of family subculture that influences the team dynamic. While this preparation takes significant work, the results create lasting positive feelings that shape organizational culture.
The failed "willpower" approach to health and wellbeing must give way to recognizing the powerful cultural influences that shape our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Our workplaces profoundly impact our health beyond basic survival needs, requiring a comprehensive cultural approach rather than isolated programs. As IBM's Chief Medical Officer puts it, "A culture of health requires a fundamental commitment to its possibility-not just through a policy, but in every decision we make."
